Simplifying Cursive: Lessons from American Penmanship

What if improving your cursive wasn’t about endlessly practising individual letters, but understanding the patterns behind them?

In this session, students will discover a simpler approach to cursive handwriting based on the traditions of American Penmanship. By breaking letters into families of related strokes, shapes, and movements, students can build greater consistency without having to relearn the same principles letter by letter.

Students will learn how to create smoother connections, develop better rhythm and spacing, and write with greater ease and confidence.

The goal isn’t simply prettier handwriting. It’s to understand why the letters work, so students leave with a practical method they can continue using to improve their own handwriting long after the session ends.

Engraving 101: Turn Everyday Objects Into Something Personal

Ever wondered how artists create those gorgeous personalized perfume bottles, glasses, mirrors, and gifts you see at events and brand activations?

Join Alex Hirsch of Signs of Our Lives for an introduction to the art of hand engraving. Alex will show you how engraving works, introduce you to the tools and techniques she uses, and demonstrate how simple lettering can transform an ordinary object into something people want to keep.

You’ll get a look at the process from start to finish, along with practical tips for getting started and ideas for where this surprisingly versatile skill can take you.

Whether you’re curious about adding engraving to your creative toolbox, offering personalization to clients, or simply want to try something extremely satisfying, this session will show you what’s possible.

Warning: you may start looking at every glass bottle in your house differently.

Letters in Bloom: Calligraphy & Watercolour Florals

Bring beautiful letters and delicate watercolour florals together to create a finished piece that feels truly your own.

In this creative session, students will learn how to combine calligraphy with loose, expressive floral painting, using colour, composition, and placement to make the lettering and artwork work together rather than compete for attention.

Amrita will demonstrate her approach using the rich, luminous colours of De Mairo paints, showing students how to build simple floral elements around their lettering and add depth and detail without overwhelming the words.

Students will leave with practical techniques for combining calligraphy and watercolour that can be used for cards, quotes, gifts, journal pages, and finished artwork, plus plenty of inspiration for bringing more colour into their calligraphy.

Ready to take your flourishing beyond the basics?

In this intermediate session, Belinda Chim will help you create flourishes that feel graceful, balanced, and beautifully connected to your lettering, rather than added on simply because there was an empty space begging for a swirl.

You’ll explore how to build more sophisticated flourishing shapes, create rhythm and movement, and understand where flourishes belong within a composition. Belinda will demonstrate how small changes in direction, spacing, and form can transform a flourish from awkward or overcrowded into something that feels effortless.

This class is designed for students who already have some experience with pointed pen flourishing and are ready for the next step.

Come prepared to make loops, curves, crossings, and probably a few glorious tangles along the way. The goal isn’t more flourishes. It’s better ones.

Your Art, Their Products: An Introduction to Art Licensing

What if you could earn money from your artwork without making, packing, and shipping every product yourself?

Welcome to the world of art licensing.

In this practical, beginner-friendly session, art licensing expert Carrie Cantwell will show you how artists and creatives can license their work to companies that turn it into everything from stationery and home décor to fabric, gifts, and more.

You’ll learn how art licensing actually works, what companies are looking for, how artists get paid, and what you need before you begin approaching potential partners. Carrie will also share practical advice for creating work with licensing potential and getting it in front of the right people.

If you’ve ever wondered how your lettering, illustration, patterns, or artwork could move beyond the page and onto real products, this session will show you what’s possible and how to start.

Bold. Angular. Unmistakable. Fraktur is a script that refuses to quietly sit on the page.

In this workshop, you’ll explore the distinctive shapes, strong contrasts, and rhythmic structure that give Fraktur its unmistakable character. You’ll learn how the letters are constructed, how they relate to one another, and how to create the balance between precision and personality that makes this historic hand so compelling.

Whether Gothic lettering is completely new to you or you’re ready to add more drama to your broad-edge repertoire, you’ll leave with a strong foundation and a whole new appreciation for one of calligraphy’s most striking scripts.

Forget the generic birthday-card aisle. In this playful workshop, Clarice Gomes will show you how to use watercolour to create bright, joyful cards designed especially for kids.

You’ll explore simple, approachable painting techniques for creating cheerful illustrations, colourful details and personality-packed designs that can be turned into birthday cards, celebration cards or just-because notes for the little people in your life.

No elaborate drawing skills required. Clarice will show you how to keep the process loose, fun and wonderfully imperfect, while creating something that feels far more special than anything you could pick up at the store.

Come ready to paint, play and leave with ideas you’ll want to use for every kid on your card list.

Where does the alphabet come from? Who do we have to thank for creating, ordering and handing down these super successful letters? And, what with all its silent letters and Magic Es, why does English spelling use the alphabet in such a quirky way? These are the mighty questions answered in Why Q Needs U, the bestselling new book hailed by Sir Stephen Fry as a “a wonderful achievement” and named by The Economist as one of its books of 2025. Author Dr Danny Bate combines linguistics, archeology, history and humour to guide readers through the millennia-long story of the alphabet, as well as English’s very specific take on the ancient technology.

Forming block letter forms: taking calligraphic techniques with a signwriting twist, working on paper with brush and ink.

A Sneak Peek Inside the Calligraphy Journal

What happens when your calligraphy practice stops living on loose sheets of paper and starts becoming a book?

Join Gabriela Soba for a glimpse inside the world of the calligraphy journal, where letters, colour, composition, texture, sketches, experiments, and even the occasional happy accident can all live together.

Gabriela will share how a journal can become much more than a place to practise. It can be a creative laboratory. A record of ideas. A place to play with words and letterforms without worrying about creating a “finished piece.”

You’ll see how she approaches pages, combines calligraphy with other visual elements, and uses the book itself as part of the creative process.

Go from stick figures to lively human figures in 3 simple steps.

Persian Calligraphy Deconstructed

with Ghazaleh Monshizadeh

Persian calligraphy can look almost impossibly fluid. Letters stretch, overlap, connect and sweep across the page in ways that seem to break every rule. But underneath all that movement is a beautifully considered system.

In Persian Calligraphy Deconstructed, Ghazaleh Monshizadeh takes us inside the letterforms to reveal how they actually work.

You'll explore the shapes, proportions, connections and rhythms that give Persian calligraphy its unmistakable character, and see how individual letters transform when they become part of a word or composition.

More than an introduction to a beautiful script, this session is an invitation to look at lettering differently. To notice structure beneath movement, intention behind every curve, and how centuries of tradition can still inspire the way we think about letters today.

No knowledge of Persian is required. Just bring your curiosity about letters.

Paint a Medieval Dragon

Step into the wonderfully strange and beautiful world of medieval illuminated manuscripts and learn how to paint a dragon worthy of the margins.

In this session, you'll discover how medieval illuminators built these fantastical creatures from shape, line, colour and detail, then create one of your own using traditional illumination techniques.

Come for the dragon. Leave with a fascinating glimpse into the artistry, imagination and painstaking craft behind some of history's most extraordinary books.

Join Kalo for an hour seminar on medieval illuminated manuscripts, where historical tradition meets modern creativity! Kalo will begin with a brief overview of the history of illumination, then guide you through the creative process behind these remarkable works, including the materials and techniques that bring them to life. You’ll also hear about Kalo’s personal journey creating illuminated manuscripts in a modern style, followed by a demo on designing an illuminated border bookmark, complete with practical tips you can use right away!

What if turning your creativity into a business didn’t mean squeezing yourself into someone else’s version of success?

There are more ways to build a creative business than most artists realize, from selling your work and working with clients to teaching what you know and building an entire world around your ideas. In this session, artist and creative business mentor Kellee Wynne will help you think bigger about what your creativity could make possible, while getting clear on the kind of business you actually want to build.

You don’t need the perfect plan before you begin. You need a place to start, the willingness to experiment, and enough room for your business to evolve with you. Because artists build differently, and your business should fit your ideas, your ambitions, and the life you want to live.

You make things. Maybe you teach occasionally. Maybe someone has asked if they can buy your work. Maybe you have 327 Instagram followers and aren't remotely convinced you need an “email marketing strategy.”

American Cursive is more than joined-up handwriting. It’s about rhythm, movement, and developing a hand that feels natural, confident, and unmistakably yours.

In this workshop with Lavina Jhangiani of Timeless Swirls, you’ll explore the foundations of American Cursive and learn how simple changes in movement, spacing, connections, and letterforms can transform the way you write.

Whether you want to make your everyday handwriting more beautiful or add a relaxed, flowing hand to your lettering repertoire, you’ll leave with practical techniques you’ll want to keep using long after the workshop ends.

Making a Creative Life Pay: A Candid Conversation with Margo Tantau

What does it really take to turn creative talent into a sustainable career?

Join Margo Tantau for a candid conversation about the business behind a creative life. Drawing on more than 30 years in licensing, product development, creative direction and artist representation, Margo shares what she has learned about getting your work noticed, finding opportunities, working with brands and creating work that has a place in the marketplace.

We’ll talk about where talented artists often get stuck, how the creative industry is changing, and what artists can do to build a career without losing the originality that makes their work their own.

If you’ve ever wondered, “Could I actually make something more of this?” this conversation is for you.

Calligraphy may begin with a nib, ink and paper, but it doesn't have to end there. Nicole will show how the iPad can extend traditional calligraphy without replacing the character of the craft.

In this workshop, we'll learn how to look at our own flourished copperplate with fresh eyes. We'll talk about spotting the hotspots, the places in a composition that are asking for a little more attention. We'll look at what makes flourishes feel like they belong together, and then, carefully and deliberately, we'll explore when it makes sense to let the rules go.

There’s a version of creative business advice that makes everything sound beautifully linear: find your niche, perfect your offer, build the audience, scale the business. Except creative careers rarely behave that nicely. In this session, we'll explore a different way to build a successful creative business, one that makes room for curiosity, experimentation, changing interests, unexpected opportunities, and the occasional complete pivot. You’ll learn how to recognize which opportunities are actually worth following, use your existing skills and interests in more than one way, stop treating every pivot as starting over, and build a creative career that can evolve alongside you. You’ll leave with a more flexible way to think about your creative business and permission to build something that works because it fits you, not because it followed somebody else’s blueprint.

Get Paid to Partner: How to Land Brand Collaborations

You don’t need a massive following to work with brands. You need to know what you bring to the table, which brands are a good fit, and how to make an offer they’ll actually want to say yes to.

In this practical session, Girl Gang Craft founder Phoebe Sherman shares how artists, makers, and creative entrepreneurs can find and secure brand partnerships. You’ll learn what brands are looking for, how to position your audience and creative work, what makes a strong pitch, and how to turn a collaboration into a relationship that benefits everyone.

Whether you’re just beginning to sell your work or already building a creative business, you’ll leave with a clearer idea of how brand partnerships work and how to start pursuing them yourself.

Beyond Beautiful Lettering: How Great Lettering Communicates Emotion

A VIP-Only 2-Hour Workshop with Sachin Shah · September 12

Beautiful letters are one thing. Letters that make someone feel something are another.

In this special two-hour VIP workshop, Sachin Shah takes you beyond technique to explore how shape, rhythm, spacing, contrast and composition can give your lettering a voice.

You’ll discover how thoughtful design choices can completely change the mood and meaning of a piece, and how to move from simply writing words beautifully to creating lettering that truly communicates.

This is a full-length, hands-on session with plenty of time to explore, experiment and see your letters differently.

Available exclusively to VIP attendees.

There is a difference between learning a craft, becoming good at it, and being ready to build a business around it.

Your Art, Your Income: A Creative’s Guide to Selling Online

with Susan Bradley

You’ve made the art. Now, how do you get people to actually buy it?

In this practical session, Susan Bradley shows artists and creatives how to turn what they make into something they can confidently sell online. You’ll explore how to attract the right buyers, create offers people want, and build a simple, repeatable approach to generating sales without feeling like you have to become a full-time marketer.

Whether you’re selling original art, prints, products, classes, or other creative work, you’ll leave with a clearer understanding of what actually moves someone from “Oh, I love that” to “Where can I buy it?”

Because making beautiful things is one skill. Learning how to sell them is another. And yes, you can learn both.